Data Centre Hosting Designed For Small & Medium Sized Businesses

What’s Important When Choosing A Data Centre?

If you’re looking to move your IT or software into the Cloud it’s likely that you already know the reasons you want to do it (or need to do it) and what the benefits will be. However, it may be challenging to understand which provider to use and what level of solution you will need. Here are some of the areas we think are important for businesses to understand.

Data Centre Uptime

The uptime of a data centre simply refers to the guaranteed amount of time that your servers will be online and working for, to look at it another way, how much downtime you could have. This figures are normally quoted in terms of a percentage and in the case of The HBP Group Data Centre our uptime guarantee is 99.741%.

In a year this equates to approximately 22 hours of potential downtime. Whilst this may seem high it does allow for maintenance time (which normally happens during non working hours) and, in our experience, is almost always a lower percentage of downtime than on-premise systems over the course of a year.

Data Centre Tier System

The Data Centre tier system is a way of categorising data centres based on their levels of power, cooling and backup functionality – mainly focusing on the redundancy of each of these areas. This basically covers how many cooling, power and internet lines serve the data centre so that in the event of a failure of one component the service can continue to operate.

As you would expect the higher the tier, the more expensive the data centre will be to use. Tiers run from Tier 1 through to Tier 4, with 4 having the most redundancy.

At The HBP Group our data centre is Tier 2, a tier that offer two levels of redundancy in each key area and provides a solution suitable for most small and medium sized businesses. Because of the Tier 2 status it also means that our solution is very cost effective compared to Tier 4 data centres, such as Microsoft Azure.

Data Centre Usage

It’s important to understand what options you have when it comes to using a data centre. A virtual server hosted in a data centre can replicate any task an on-premise server can do, so for most businesses they can use data centre hosting for all key areas of their organisation’s IT and software requirements.

In general this is used for hosting software applications and data.

Applications which are traditionally used on an on-premise server (such as Sage 200, Pegasus Opera 3 or Exchequer) can be installed in a data centre and accessed remotely by your staff. Company data can also be stored and accessed in the same way if required. A common way of storing data in the cloud is to support a backup strategy that should always include at least one off-site copy of your data, which works perfectly with a cloud hosting option.

If you’d like more details about The HBP Group Data Centre then please visit The HBP Group Data Centre page.